"The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography."
-- Oscar Wilde

Wednesday, December 24, 2014

My Friend, Ebenezer Scrooge

Few
books are more consistently misread
than A Christmas Carol (1843), by Charles Dickens (1812-1870). Everyone has seen some adaption of the story –
featuring anyone from Basil Rathbone
to Michael Caine to Mr. Magoo – or, more ubiquitous still,
some parody or sendup of the tale.

Ask
anyone what A Christmas Carol is about, and almost certainly they will tell you
it’s a parable about greed. Ebenezer Scrooge, they will tell you,
is a miser, hoarding his money at the expense of his employee, Bob Crachit, and
refusing to use a portion of it for the common good. His late partner, Jacob Marley, sends to him
the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future, they will go on to say, showing
him the error of his ways, and he reforms by becoming more generous.

That,
however, is not the story Dickens wrote, nor the lesson he wished to impart.

Scrooge
as miser is a woeful misreading of Dickens’ story. The great sin of which Scrooge was guilty was
not a niggardly withholding of money, but of personal warmth, distancing himself
from the rest of humanity, and refusing his place in the community.

Again
and again the mighty Ghosts of Christmas haunt our protagonist with his
refusals of human interaction, not mere miserliness. As a boy, Scrooge was left at school during
the holidays, alone and unloved. His
mother is never mentioned, and his father only in passing (‘he is so much
kinder now’), but not in any way that demonstrates he loves his son. Worse yet, Scrooge’s beloved sister Fran dies
early; and Scrooge is later apprenticed to a man who provides one of the few
positive influences of his life, Mr. Fezziwig.
But the lessons of Fezziwig do not take, and Scrooge turns away his
chance at lifelong love by allowing his fiancée, Belle, to leave him. Scrooge devotes himself to business, not
simply to grow rich and comfortable, but to fill up his ever emptying
life. He keeps fellow human beings at a
distance… alienating his one relative, his nephew Fred (presumably Fran’s child),
and closing himself off from his colleagues or employees.

The
great tragedy of Scrooge is that we see him as an imaginative boy, delighting in
childhood tales of Ali Baba and Robinson Crusoe … and we watch that boy almost
obliterated by the unimaginative and unforgiving man he becomes. What the Ghosts do, in essence, is connect
Scrooge with his inner child.

Few
authors wrote of children with the insight and intelligence of Dickens; perhaps
that is because he was one of those few adults gifted with a childlike sense of
wonder. Mind – not a childish sense of wonder, for that rare
commodity is no such thing. Dickens, as
Scrooge would, too, after his visitations, was able to see the world with the
clear-eyed view of a child, and reprioritize what’s important. As Dickens himself writes in the book, for it is good to be children sometimes,
and never better than at Christmas, when its mighty Founder was a child himself.

Though
not a children’s novel by any stretch of the imagination, A Christmas Carol has
been read and enjoyed by children for more than a century. This is fascinating, because a great deal of
children’s literature (most notably Peter
Pan) is about putting away childhood things and parting ways with wonder
and childhood passions. That is the way,
these books argue, to health.

Dickens,
on the other hand, believes in an integration of wonder into the adult for
successful and happy maturity. Scrooge
becomes whole by adopting the wonders of his vision of the Christmas Ghosts. They are not, like a visit to Neverland,
temporary, but permanent. This is much
to our taste. We here at The Jade Sphinx like our heroes (and
worldview) to incorporate wonder! Bravo
Dickens. At ‘em Scrooge!

If
you are visited by Christmas Ghosts tonight, we sincerely hope that the
experience is as terrible, as wondrous, and as life-affirming as that of
Ebenezer Scrooge. We could wish you no
greater gift.

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James Abbott

James Abbott is a California-based writer and arts advocate. His online column The Jade Sphinx (http://thejadesphinx.blogspot.com/) champions the Fine Arts, featuring stories on such concepts as recognizable quality, artistic heritage and tradition, and techniques of the Great Masters.